man pages section 1: User Commands

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Updated: July 2014
 
 

apropos(1)

Name

apropos - locate commands by keyword lookup

Synopsis

apropos keyword...

Description

The apropos utility displays the manual page name, section number, subsection name, the keyword, and a short description for each manual page that contains keyword.

This information is contained in the index files that are either automatically created by an SMF service as described in man(1) and man(5), or manually created using catman(1M) with –w option.

Each word is considered separately and the case of letters is ignored. Stemming on English words and section matching are also supported. Words which are part of other words are considered. For example, when looking for compile, apropos finds all instances of compiler as well. .

As apropos is simply the –k option to the man(1) command, see man(1) for more details.

Examples

Example 1 Finding a Manual Page with a Name Line Containing keyword

Try

example% apropos password

and

example% apropos editor

If the line starts filename(section) ..., you can run

man -s section filename

to display the manual page for filename.

Example 2 Finding a Manual Page for the printf() Subroutine

Try

example% apropos format

and then

example% man -s 3s printf

to get the manual page on the subroutine printf().

Files

/usr/share/man/man_index/*

Table of Contents and keyword database.

Generated files include:

  • /usr/share/man/man_index/man.idx

  • /usr/share/man/man_index/man.dic

  • /usr/share/man/man_index/man.frq

  • /usr/share/man/man_index/man.pos

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Availability
text/doctools
CSI
Enabled
Interface Stability
Committed

See also

man(1), whatis(1), catman(1M), attributes(5), man(5)